


Growing Pains

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-21
Updated: 2011-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:50:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of snapshot as Jessica, daughter of the Mad Duke and the Black Rose, grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growing Pains

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my livejournal October 23, 2009.

Jessica is four and attending her first children’s party with the rest of the nobility. She’s deposited into a room filled with more children than she’s ever seen in one place at once besides the beggar kids who hang around the docks—still a little too young to brave Riverside on their own. These children are much more richly dressed though, and well fed, and much more provoking and vindictive.

When the chubby eight year old boy with the red hair and the suspicious glances calls her a bastard, Jessica’s already had her cookie that her nurse promised her if she got dressed quietly like a good girl stolen, been laughed at for her new dress, and been poked in the side by an irritating girl who says her name over and over, and when she turns around and asks “what?” tells her “nothing,” with a sly grin. It’s really the last straw, and Jessica lashes out at him like a wild thing, spitting and kicking and jabbing with her elbows in just the right places, just like the boot boy taught her.

Lady Wesley is furious when she storms into the room to find her boy bleeding and sniffling in the corner. She’s not sure how to react when the heartless bully turns out to be a tiny girl half his size who’s sobbing as she thrashes her way out of the arms of the footman restraining her. Katherine carries her out to the carriage two and a half hours before the party is over, holding Jessica in her lap as she hasn’t done in a long while.

It’s the last time Jessica enters the Hill society for a good many years.

*

Jessica is six years old, and she wants to grow up soon so she can take care of her mother. Elsie, in the kitchen at the Riverside house, says that’s what families do, and Jessica may not live with her, but no one can tell her that her mother isn’t her family. Rose needs someone to take care of her, too. Jessica goes and sits in her dressing room during performances on weekends, pouring her mother water as she comes offstage, helping her with her makeup. Rose always says that she doesn’t know how she managed before Jessica, and Jessica doesn’t know either.

She worries about her mother during the week, coming offstage and having no one waiting with a shawl or ready to run out for a nice cup of tea, steaming hot with two sugars, just the way Rose likes it. Sometimes after the performance is over, Jessica is allowed to stay, to help the stage hands set props and sweep up before the next show, to follow the stage manager and the set designer up to the catwalk to chat about the technical performance and gossip about the actors as they smoke, passing a pipe back and forth.

Nobody minds Jessica. If she’s old enough to follow her mother deep into the city at the end of every week, she’s old enough to hear everything they have to say, old enough to lend a hand, old enough to even contribute to the conversation a little bit, here and there. The company will teach her stage combat by the time she’s seven, how to put on makeup without a mirror by the time she’s ten and how to smoke tobacco by the time she’s twelve. In a way, Jessica will always be the theater’s girl.

*

Jessica’s seven and she wants to be a great swordswoman like Katherine, but Katherine says she has to be patient if she wants to learn the sword, she has to practice every day. She has to go to her lessons instead of hanging around the kitchens because great swordswomen need to cultivate their minds, she needs to watch her footwork because flashy tricks are nothing without the basics, she needs to wear a dress to dinner Jessica, it’s only proper, you’re going to shock everyone enough as it is without gadding about with your legs everywhere at a formal meal. You are not actually an actress.

Jessica knows she’s not an actress. She doesn’t glitter in the spotlight like Rose, drawing crowds from far and wide. Her smile doesn’t dazzle people with a single glance from across a crowded street. She’s lightning fast, though, even if it does make her footwork a little sloppy, and she’s brave as anyone, she crawled out all the way across the highest catwalk with Ephram, the apprentice boy at the theater, and she didn’t hesitate once, even when the walkway swayed faintly beneath her. Jessica thinks she’d make a fine swordswoman

*

Jessica is eight and she’s just been given a nickname for the first time. Her nurse tried to keep her below decks for the voyage, but it’s a long trip, and Jessica is often referred to as an unholy terror, and she’s on deck learning seamen’s knots and scrambling through the rigging in no time.

The sailors call her Jess.

She likes that. Jess. It’s a proper name for an adventurer. She thinks that when she meets her father, a man who fled every duty he’d ever been trusted with to travel the globe, she will stand tall, hold her hand out confidently, like Marcus does on business deals, and say, “Hello, father. I’m Jess.”

*

Jessica is thirteen and Marcus is getting married tomorrow. They are having a family dinner for him at Tremontaine house; Jessica and Katherine and Marcus and Artemisia, all of Jessica’s young, beautiful, not quite parents. Dinner is a little odd, but comfortable, just the three adults talking politics as Jessica tries not to spill her soup—she’s trying to be a little bit of a lady tonight.

She knows it’s childish, but Marcus was always the person she counted on to be sensible when Katherine is in one of her impulsive moods, and Jessica knows he’s leaving to have a real family, and maybe if she’s good, he’ll remember to come back sometimes.

After dinner, Marcus pulls her to the side as they’re all leaving the room and says, “You do know I’m not really going anywhere, don’t you, Jess? I’ll still be in every day to help Katie with her bookkeeping and make sure she doesn’t beggar you all buying fabric.”

It’s nice that he remembers to call her Jess. No one else does, most of the time.

“What are you on about?” she asks, putting on her Actress voice (it’s not Rose’s voice so much as Katherine trying to imitate Rose’s voice that she’s drawing on). “Of course I know that. What difference does it make to me if you’re married or not?”

“So the sweet young lady act tonight wasn’t for my benefit?” he asks with a wry twist of his lips.

Jessica does her best to look offended, but she’s smiling a little anyway as she offers, “Maybe I’ve matured?”

If the evening ended there it would have been lovely, but Jessica has always been a prowler, and it’s two hours after she was sent to bed when she’s wandering the halls and hears a shattering sound. She walks toward it and is surprised to hear Marcus’s raised voice, “-Didn’t know, Katie, how could I have known? It’s been years.”

“I know,” Katherine says. “You didn’t know because I didn’t tell you. Susan’s lovely. You’ll have a lovely family.” She sound perfectly composed, but the pretty wallpaper of the sitting room is marred by the shards of a pretty knick-knack that had decorated the room since the last Duchess Tremontaine had decorated it. “I told you to go home, Marcus. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Katie-” he sounds gentle now, almost pleading.

“You said it yourself, Marcus, it’s been years. Now go home.”

“You’ll still-”

“I’ll still dance at your wedding, but please, Marcus-”

He goes.

Katherine turns to the little side door and calls, “Jess?”

Jessica steps cautiously into the room and Katherine laughs, a brittle sound, and says, “I learned that one from your father.”

Jessica stands, stares, and Katherine elaborates, waving a negligent hand at the destroyed crystal vase in pieces on the floor.

“I should ask one of the older servants to see to it, one of the ones who was here when I got here. Perhaps it will remind them.”

Jessica’s been waiting for Katherine to come to her senses and shout at her to get to bed, but now she thinks she understands. She steps forward, toward the Duchess Tremontaine who wasn’t much older than Jessica is now when she was dragged from everything she knew to a bizarre mirror-world created by a madman who was her uncle. A world where the only scrap of stability was an extremely nondescript servant boy who knew everything there was to know about the twisting, crazy house.

Jessica has heard the stories. She thinks she might know what they mean, now. She steps forward and hugs the confused girl who’s lost her only touchstone.

*

Jessica is fourteen and she is a disgrace. Katherine says so. Everyone says so. One ill-advised adventure involving taking off from the ball with one of the more disreputable serving men to dance and dice in Riverside, and all the gently reared ladies are tutting behind their palms about poor Katherine, who’s tried so hard, but blood will tell, won’t it. As the Mad Duke’s daughter, she’s living up to all their expectations. Is that what she wants, Katherine asks?

Jessica glares. At least she not still yelling about the danger. Even Katherine realizes that there isn’t much harm that’ll come to her in Riverside. There, they remember her father as something more than a lunatic. They remember him as someone to be respected. Jessica’s always been safe in Riverside. Katherine’s not done, though. Her voice lowers, trembling a little, as she asks, “How do you expect they’ll accept you as the Duchess Tremontaine, if you act like that?”

The question is a slap to the face, an unlooked for revelation.

“I don’t want to be the duchess,” she says. “I never have.”

*

Jessica is fifteen and her mother is dying. The city is already in mourning for her, and it’s become fashionable for young noblemen to send her flowers, so much so that her room is literally overflowing with them. The vases spill out into the hallway, the stairwell, the little sitting room near the front door of the riverside house where the Duchess insisted Rose come to stay as soon as she fell ill.

Katherine is kind, Jessica can admit that, but she can tell that she’s embarrassed, a little, by the attention Rose’s presence in the house is getting among the nobility, and sometimes it makes Jessica angry. For someone so unconventional, Katherine is absurdly proud about her reputation.

Jessica’s angry about everything these days. Marcus says that’s just what it’s like to be fifteen. He looks sort of wistful as he says it, though, and Jessica can’t imagine why anyone would miss being this age. She’s clumsy and gawky and all elbows and knees. Everything gets on her nerves, and nothing holds her interest the way it used to except for the shipyard. She goes down as often as she can to watch those huge white sails soar out into the unknown and wishes she were going with them.

She feels like everything gets under her skin and all she wants to do is lash out, to hurt the pretty noble girls that sneer at her, their brutish brothers who leer at her when they think no one is watching. She wants to shatter the unforgiving printing presses that chronicle her mother’s decline in gruesome detail and lampoon Katherine mercilessly.

Jessica needs to get out, to get away, and she isn’t sure if it’s because she’s born to wander, or just because she’s fifteen and her mother’s dying.

When it happens, when the Black Rose has well and truly exited left-sinister, Jessica isn’t sure what to do. She could go and get a doctor, but what good would that do? Her mother is dead. She sits. She waits. She realizes there’s a fairly limited amount of time that she’s willing to spend holding her mother’s slowly cooling hand. She stands up and walks out.

She finds Katherine in her office, but can’t imagine what to say. She stands in the doorway. Katherine looks up with a tired smile and says, “Come here, Jessica.”  
Because there’s no hint of Katherine’s usual veiled command in the request, she does. Katherine sighs, looks down at her desk and say, “I was a little in love with her--your mother, I mean--when I was young.”

It’s a strange thing to hear, but she’s not surprised. Who could ever not love Rose? Brilliant and elegant, star of the stage—“I was, too,” she replies.

*

Jessica is seventeen and she has a small ship and a small cargo and an even smaller crew. She’s also got the wind on her face and the sun at her back and a little splinter of guilt in her heart where the family that raised her used to be.

Jessica is seventeen and she answers to nobody.


End file.
